When writing large documents with a text editor, it is sometimes useful to zoom out and get a high-level view of the file (I believe Sublime Text has a feature called minimap that does this). This functionality can be added to gVim with a simple vimrc addition (to my knowledge, this will not work with regular Vim).

Add the zoom out command with the following: noremap <Leader>zo :set guifont=courier_new:h4<CR>

Opening a scratch buffer in Vim can come in handy. The following vimrc addition works well: nnoremap <Leader>sc :e scratch<CR>:setlocal readonly<CR>

It is especially useful in combination with the run shell command shortcut once Vim is configured to change to the directory of the current file with the following vimrc addition: autocmd BufEnter * execute "chdir ".escape(expand("%:p:h"), ' ')

The advantage this named buffer has over the [No Name] buffers created …